II.

Responsibilities

The president dictates the CIA’s general tasks and assignments, a process known as tasking. The nature of the tasks has changed over the years. Today, for example, the CIA’s responsibilities include identifying terrorists and halting terrorist attacks, anticipating threats to international oil supplies, and preventing the theft of trade secrets from US businesses. These problems were less acute in the agency’s early years. The CIA must also monitor the spread of weapons of mass destruction, such as nuclear and chemical weapons, and prevent these weapons from falling into the hands of terrorists or criminals. See also Terrorism; Nuclear Weapons; Chemical and Biological Warfare.

Some responsibilities have remained constant, however. The foremost of the CIA’s jobs is assessing the long-term potential threat to the United States by other countries. The CIA also has to predict short-term military threats, so it operates a warning system to protect the United States and its allies from surprise attack. In addition, the CIA works in cooperation with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to forestall terrorist attacks and to conduct counter-espionage.

Several presidents have also ordered the CIA to conduct covert operations (the use of secret means to achieve foreign policy objectives). Covert operations might include providing weapons to a rebel army, kidnapping an individual leader who is seen as hostile to US interests, or organizing the removal of a government through a coup d’état. President Gerald Ford banned assassination as an instrument of US policy following a congressional (see Congress of the United States) investigation of the CIA’s malpractices in 1975, but President George W. Bush restored the policy in the wake of the September 11 attacks. The CIA’s covert operations are controversial for this reason and because they so often involve conducting violent actions in other countries without a congressional declaration of war. In other instances the operations are uncontroversial and are covert in name only, and may become the subject of debate in open sessions of Congress and in the news media.

The CIA also has the responsibility of gathering information from other US intelligence agencies and producing joint reports known as estimates. The NSA, for example, often breaks secret codes used by other countries and then intercepts the countries’ secret communications. The NSA passes the important messages to the CIA, which then integrates this information with the intelligence provided by other US government intelligence agencies and with intelligence from the CIA’s own sources. The CIA sends these estimates to the president and other members of the National Security Council (NSC), which includes the chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (representing the armed forces), the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and certain other members of the government’s executive branch.